FOSS.in – Day 0

Hello from Bangalore! Just got back to my lodgings after the first day of FOSS.in! I still have lots of pictures and stuff to upload, but here are a couple of videos I took yesterday of the scenery in Bangalore. I have to say the traffic here is amazing; there doesn’t seem to be any conformance to the lines in the road, you have rickshaws and bicyclists and pedestrians and scooters and trucks and bikes and full-size cars (sometimes dogs, cows, and monkeys too) alike all sharing the road with what seem to be few traffic signals, but somehow it all just works and I haven’t seen an accident yet. It still kind of freaks me out how sometimes we’ll appear to be on a highway ramp and there are people just calmly walking up and down the ramp as if nothing unusual is going on!

I have to say this conference seems very well-organized and the accommodations I am in are very nice and comfortable – a nice place to go to relax after a long day. :) The FOSS.in organizers take great care of their speakers!

More to come soon. :)

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About Máirín Duffy

Máirín is a principal interaction designer at Red Hat. She is passionate about software freedom and free & open source tools, particularly in the creative domain: her favorite application is Inkscape. You can read more from Máirín on her blog at blog.linuxgrrl.com.

Discussion

7 thoughts on “FOSS.in – Day 0”

Traffic in india

The traffic in india is an example of bottom up self organisation. Much the same as the design of the city of manchester. The system has a few basic rules and elements within the system which can follow the rules. Rules like don’t crash, and get from point A to point B are pretty much all you need. Following this the mass of nodes reacting to each other creates the emergent behavior of a working system. Organised complexity is the term generally used.

Simply put in many situations (if not all) bottom up organisation has benefits over top down organisation (imposition of traffic signals as an example). Bottom up behavior allows for dynamic change in circumstance, e.g. if there’s a car accident because of the basic bottom up rule set people meander around it, until it is cleared, the clearing process will be less intrusive to the journey of those on the road because it doesn’t come into their ruleset. In a top down system a car accident would mean closing the road, redirecting traffic, clearing the accident, causing congestion in the process, and finally re-opening the road and decongesting it.

The world is built on bottom up systems, its us silly human beings who decide to create top down rulers and overlords.

I’ve never experienced Bangalore’s traffic, but I know how it is in New Delhi, and it’s exactly like that.
I don’t know exactly how the system works, but for some reasons it does. You see more accident in Italy where things on the streets look more organized than that.
Incredible.

Heh, you should have seen it before they put all the one-way streets in. It’s scarier in Goa, as they drive really fast along country roads through villages, where passing is done whether or not there is oncoming traffice — if so, then a third lane is spontaneously created with maybe an inch on either side. I tried to video some of this but couldn’t look out the front window any more!